Objectives of Recruitment and Selection

Recruitment is the process of attracting quality candidates to fill existing job openings. The process may include advertising job openings through social media, professional associations, and career-related websites. Through recruitment, hiring managers reach out to the potential and passive job applicants and encourage them to apply for available openings.

Meanwhile, selection is the process of pre-screening, reviewing, prioritizing, and shortlisting applicants to identify the most suitable candidate for the job.  The aim is to filter and onboard candidates with the right behavioral traits, attitude, and domain knowledge to fulfill the task efficiently. The two processes go together in hiring the most relevant candidates. Attracting a large number of applicants ensures that the company has a vast candidate pool to choose the desired candidates. Talent acquisition specialists can then employ various methods to hire a suitable candidate.

Traditionally, recruitment was done through newspaper job posting and selection was done through in-person interviews or pen-and-paper tests; the hiring managers took the decision mostly based on their perceived understanding. Such a process was biased and flawed as it did not result in onboarding candidates that would have a long-standing association with the company. Additionally, candidates were expected to appear for pen-and-paper tests to move to the next round of interviews. This increased the timeline of the entire recruitment and selection cycle. A mutually agreeable time-slot for the interviewer and the interviewee was the first impediment. It was a logistical hassle for the interviewee who had to commute to a different city or a remote location, especially for the written test. Such issues called for technological interventions to streamline and improve the efficiency of the process. The need was to adopt procedures that lend convenience to HRs, simultaneously upholding the interests of the candidates.

Recruitment and selection procedures have evolved in the last few years since the job market has increasingly become candidate-driven. Recruitment is no longer confined to the organization’s wants. With an eye on hiring the best possible candidates, providing a good candidate experience has become one of the foremost priorities of HRs. This is so because every company wants to hire the best candidate. So, what a company offers to attract the best and brightest is the most critical differentiator. Employers who wish to onboard the top talent have adapted to a candidate-driven market by creating a faster and easier process to onboard the candidates who may be in discussion with several other companies to discuss a job prospect.

The HR landscape is in a continual technological disruption. The use of modern tools is enabling recruiters and companies to attract and engage a larger candidate pool. With the introduction of online assessments, video interviews, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs), and other such tools, organizations have begun implementing them in their recruitment and selection journey. Companies now have video cover letters and conduct video interviews more regularly. There are more aggressive pre-employment skills testing with multiple assignments to ensure whether candidates are right fits. Consequently, candidates have become proactive in reaching out to recruiters, hiring managers, and executives while on the lookout for a job.

To ensure the selection and recruitment process is smooth and effective, the Human Resource department has specific objectives to aid in meeting the company’s mission and vision. We interviewed a few talent experts to better understand the broader goals of the HR fraternity. The following excerpt is a part of the interview with Matt Erhard, Managing Partner, Summit Search Group.

Create a Talent Pool

      HRs and recruiters have the requisite access to the resources to find qualified candidates. In several ways, hiring the right people is a game of numbers. Your chances of finding the right candidates increase exponentially by reaching out to a bigger pool of candidates. Recruiters also tend to work within specific career segments. They have rich experience in identifying qualified applicants for the type of position their company is hiring. The process ensures that one has a more extensive set of candidates to choose from, as well as with the relevant skill-set.

Attract and Engage Top Talent

      A hiring manager’s job is to find and connect with the talent that has the requisite skill-set for the offered role. However, managers must communicate succinctly to attract the right kind of candidates. A well-crafted job description communicating the number of open positions, job responsibilities, qualifications, and experience required are what attract the candidates. In such a case, if the candidate wishes to know more about the opening, they can further interact with the hiring manager. A relevant job post draws a more significant segment of potential applicants.

Improve the Quality of Hires

      Improving the quality of hire metric is one of the most crucial objectives of recruitment and selection. Pre-selection helps to condense the received applications to the most suitable options. This reduces the workload of the hiring manager and allows them to spend more time focusing on the most viable candidates. This significantly reduces the possibility of overlooking the exceptional credentials of a candidate.

Ascertain Who Fits in the Company Culture

      Fitting in a company is essential for the growth of an individual as well as an organization as employees must align with the broader organizational vision. Therefore, talent experts must zero in on candidates that will adhere to the company’s work culture. This can be achieved by using personality assessments and other such tools to identify people who are most likely to fit well in your workplace’s culture and environment.

Streamline the Process

      Organizations intend to develop and deploy a seamless recruitment and selection process. Streamlining the process begins right from pre-screening, which involves collecting necessary information about the candidate. Organizations must use technology in the HR processes, be it during screening, interviewing, or shortlisting. Sifting through initial resumes is one of the more tedious aspects of hiring, as well as one of the least productive since HRs are bound to receive at least a few applications that are unqualified. An automated system that shows you which resumes match most closely to the critical skills and requirements of the job can significantly streamline the first stage of hiring. It helps take the process to the interview round faster.

Quality of hires and cultural fit hiring are two building blocks of building effective employee recruitment and selection strategy. New hire brings some value proposition to a company.  So, the hire needs to be in sync with what the company envisions.

i) Improve the Quality of Hires

Quality of hire metric signifies the value that new hires add to your organization in the long-term. It indicates the quantum of success of the new hire in an extended timeframe. Studies suggest that top-performing employees generate four times the output of an average employee. Hence, if the human resources can track the growth journey of hires, it would add significant strategic and financial value to the business. Companies that improve the quality of hires invest in the right technological solutions and use data to drive decisions.

-Challenges in Improving the Quality of Hires

The quality of new hires is essential for organizations. If a candidate is not the right fit, he or she will not be happy, and the organization will suffer. This can lead to an increase in voluntary turnover and a decrease in overall employee engagement. Companies grapple with various other problems while evaluating the quality of their hires. Some of them are listed below:

Building a Strong Employer Brand

 Brand building is not merely limited to having a sound social media presence and good Glassdoor ratings; it incorporates much more. Quality candidates search for a strong employer brand and an excellent work culture. Organizations often fail to cater to the wants of the employee.

Recruiting Right Talent in a Short Time

      The need to fill a role quickly is one of the most significant challenges to hiring good quality talent. Hiring on a tight deadline always presents the risk of recruiters opting for the most qualified candidate available, and not the best candidate for the position.

Identifying Quality Candidates

While the quality of hire is a priority for HR and talent leaders, organizations have no standard for defining, measuring, and improving this critical metric. Identifying quality candidates becomes a roadblock when candidates possess a plethora of skills but don’t appear to be cultural fits.

Engaging Qualified Candidates

Engaging candidates can be challenging for human resource professionals. Once you have identified top talent, it is crucial to retain them. However, due to the lack of HR practices to engage them, companies may fail to onboard the top talent.

Backed by data, technology is making the recruitment process more effective and efficient. Organizations that are adopting and implementing HR technologies have experienced positive changes in their recruitment cycles. Some tools that have lent ease to HRs in the process are:

1.     Psychometric and Coding Assessments
2.     Technical and Coding Tests
3.     Structured Interviews
4.     Virtual Assessment Centers

ii) Hiring for Culture Fit Employees

A company’s culture is the collective values and beliefs of its members. Everyone, including the company’s founders, workforce, management, and work environment, comes within its ambit. Just as there are differences in individual personalities, the diversity of business culture across different companies is remarkable. It probably explains why some people find it easy to gel better in some companies than others. Cultural fit means that the employees’ beliefs and behaviors are aligned with their employer’s core values and company culture.

-Benefits of Building a Culturally Fit Workforce

Building a culturally fit workforce proves to be a boon for organizations. To understand its importance and benefits for companies, we interviewed  Derek Gillette, VP – Marketing, Leadr, and Matt Dunne, Hiring Manager, Healing Holidays. Five following benefits emerged from the conversation:

• Improves Quality of Hires

      New employees tend to be more productive if they like the workplace and the nature of work. The output of employees who deem to be a cultural fit is comparatively much higher than those who are not. Culture refers to two elements:
– The vision and core problem of the organization
– The standard behaviors or guiding principles

Both these elements provide organizations a better grid for analyzing candidates. You now have a clearer idea of what to look for and screen against, hence improving the quality of hires.

• Increases Retention Rate

      According to a report from ‘The Wynhurst Group,’ new employees who went through a structured onboarding program were 58% more likely to remain associated with the organization after three years. Great cultures may both attract and repel. There is a natural purge that often needs to happen. The retention rate tends to improve as employees begin to feel a sense of belonging, especially as HR teams can structure the onboarding process to match the whys and hows of the organization’s culture.

• Better Employee Engagement

      A team that enjoys its work, and has an open forum to provide suggestions and feedback, stay more engaged. Employees feel valued in a workplace that promotes an environment for personal growth, where their opinions are valued. A healthy work culture ensures that employees remain motivated and engaged.

• Increases Efficiency and Productivity

      In the era of  ‘Future of Work’ and ‘Human Capital 4.0’, it is especially important as a majority of organizations are facing changes, volatility, and ambiguity. Strong teams with shared values are nimbler and can adapt more readily to this change and uncertainty.  Conversely, productivity is likely to slump due to low morale in a disjointed team consisting of people with different personalities and ways of working.

• Decreases Recruitment Cost

     According to a 2019 study by SpeakUp, 58% of people said they would take a job with a competing company if the company had a better culture than the existing one. Hiring a cultural fit in the workplace helps in weeding out unqualified candidates by measuring their values against the values believed by a company. You don’t want to hire someone and find out that they are unable to understand the role, causing you additional costs and time in replacing and re-training another candidate. So, recruiting a culturally fit candidate results in reducing the overall recruitment cost.

Culturally fit candidates exhibit certain workplace behaviors that ensure that they will be able to thrive in the organization. Screening applications, filtering the right set of candidates, and finally interviewing them enables HRs to hire culturally fit candidates. Once organizations have employed the HR technology to screen candidates, in-person interviews follow, to finally focus on people with the expected workplace behavior or behavioral traits.  Taking into account a set of competencies that are essential in determining an organizational culture fit employee, you can ask questions to your prospective employees as listed below.

Screening Questions to Measure Adaptability

• What will you do if your teammate’s work style does not align with yours, considering that you have a deadline to meet?
• How will you adjust when introduced to new technology at the workplace for which you must dedicate the extra time?

Screening Questions to Measure Teamwork

• How would you manage to get work done and communicate changes in your report, given that you are working with a freelance designer?
• How would you complete a team task working with a laid-back teammate?

      Similarly, you can devise a competency framework that covers the values of your companies or seek help from experts, understand the required behavioral traits, and prepare a well-thought-out questionnaire.

The necessity of gauging candidates’ personalities during interviews calls for psychometrics testing. Incorporating psychometric assessments into the hiring process gained primacy. Employers want to remove the guesswork out of the hiring process, which is why psychometric tests are useful. These tests help employers assess the intelligence, skills, and personality traits of the candidates. Recruiters use the outcome of these tests to evaluate whether the candidate suits the company’s requirements. Such tests keep the impact of bad hires at bay, as they uncover far more about a candidate’s personality than a standard interview.